Live Forever with Ray

Ray Kurzweil gave the second GDC keynote. He was talking about the next 20 years of games, and specifically the behaviour of exponential growth in relation to human development.

Ray at the GDC

If something increases by a seemingly small percentage at regular intervals, the growth seems to chug along for a little while and then suddenly takes off at an enormous speed.  Start with 100 pounds and earn 10% interest per year. After 1 year you get 10 pounds interest. After 2 years you get 11 pounds interest. Three years gives you around 12 pounds. Spool forward a while and the rate of increase really takes off, after 10 years you have over 200 pounds. This is the principle that is supposed to pay off my mortgage, providing the rate of interest stays OK (which of course it hasn't.........)

Anyhoo, back to the keynote. Ray made the point that as technology progresses more and more of our businesses are becoming information based. He reckons that with a move to nano-technology for production industry will be information based, and that with the work on genome sequencing health already is, etc etc. And with exponential growth continuing in the field of information processing for the foreseeable future things are just going to get more and more interesting.

I'm not completely convinced by this argument myself, making wonderful hardware is all very well, but the human race has proved spectacularly inept making software and so I don't think that everything will turn out quite as rosy as the predictions from Ray. Having said that, he is rich and successful and I'm Rob, so we will see.

One thing he said did intrigue me though. Ray reckons that the pace of medical development means that at the moment for each year that goes by we add around 3 months to the average life-span. If this is exponential, and he reckons that now health research is based on information processing it should be, in the not too distant future we will be adding more than a year to the average life-span each year, which means that we are in potential "live forever" territory. I'm not sure where this leaves video games, although I suppose we'll all need something fun to do during our infinite retirement....

Growing your own game content

There are two ways you can get content into games. You can hand craft and design your entire environment, painstakingly the drawing trees, rocks, grass and sky. Or you can get a program to create all this for you. In the first approach you get exactly what you want, but it takes a while and you have to do all the work yourself. In the second you use carefully managed randomness to get something which "grew" by itself.

First thing this morning we were at a talk by the developers of FarCry 2, which is due for release later this year. They've gone for the programmatic approach to making their jungle. Their trees really grow, based on parameters and design settings from the graphics designers creating the game world world. They don't actually create the scenery when the game runs, instead they use a whole bunch of programs to make it before it is fed into the game. The end result was really impressive, with very realistic trees which wave in the breeze, and even come to bits when the weather hits storm force.

I expect that in the future more games will work this way, as the power of the consoles increases and the increasing amount of detail in the game environments makes it harder to make this stuff by hand.

GDC Update

I went to a couple of other sessions yesterday which were of note. The first was an Xbox Live session. This really has taken off in a big way. There was much description of how to improve "conversion", which is where you persuade someone to take their trial version of the game and pay money to convert it into the full game. As the presenter said, most of this is common sense, but it was nice to see it backed up by statistics and set down in one place. The key things are:

1. Make sure that the trial gives a good impression of the best bits. If the game takes a while to get going, don't just give the player the first level. Make something special for the trial game that gives the whole experience.
2. Make sure that you don't give the farm away with your trial. People playing the trial version for 5 hours is a problem, they should have bought the game a long time ago. This is hard to do without conflicting with rule 1 of course. Time limited play is a good plan.
3. Make the game really, really, easy to pick up. Someone who has paid good money for a game will be motivated to invest their own time in learning the controls and gameplay. If they have paid nothing to get started they are much more inclined to ditch your game if they find it hard to understand at the start.
4. Have a natural end point for the trial that leads nicely into the full game.

Another thing that came out of the discussion was that Xbox Live are very amenable to highly original ideas, much more so than "proper" game developers. If you have an idea this is a good place to take it. And with XNA games now appearing on Live, and a means for getting a following using the community stuff that is coming soon, things can only get more interesting.

The final presentation I went to was from Nintendo. Takao Sawano had come over from Japan to explain how the Wii Fit platform came about. This is the latest in the sequence of "disruptive technologies" that the Wii and the DS have brought to gaming. The presentation was simultaneously translated from Mr Sawano's Japanese text, but none the worse for this, with the translator keeping up admirably. The Wii Fit game took as its' starting point a pair of bathroom scales. Mr. Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo producer reckoned that people might like the idea of tracking their weight using the Wii. The presentation showed how they developed prototype hardware using rotary encoders to measure the weight before finally fixing on the use of four strain gauges fitted at each corner of the platform.

I know a lot about strain gauges. I used them to weigh fish in a motion compensated weighing machine that I helped build a few years back. They are very accurate and highly sensitive. Using them means that the platform can measure changes in weight in the tens of grams, even being able to detect when you raise and lower your hand. They are also fast, so the game can get fresh readings 60 times a second. This has led to all kinds of games based on weight shifting and aerobics. In the exhibition they have some set up with a skiing game that looks ace.  In Japan they've sold well over a million so far and the game comes to Europe in late April. Of course I'm going to get one. It might even help me get a bit fitter...

The Great Smell of Rob

I keep ending up in Wallgreens chemist (or pharmacy as they call them here). It seems to sell everything I need. Today I went in having exhausted my supply of the great smell of Lynx. The shop keeps things that are mildly valuable under lock and key in the aisles, and so I had to press a button on the display to get someone to come and liberate what I wanted to buy. As soon as I pressed it a digitised voice announced loudly "Assistant to Deodorant Display". A girl with a bunch of keys turned up within seconds, walked straight past everyone else and up to me, and opened up the shelf so I could get what I wanted.

Perhaps I needed the deodorant more than I thought...

Living History

In the afternoon another amazing presentation. Two people who created the field of computer games.

Allan Alcorn and Ralph H. Baer - you owe these guys

Ralph made the first ever home video game. First ever. It was entirely analogue and made up of discrete transistors. He patented it (along with 150 or so other ideas that he had) and got everything started. Allan Alcorn designed and built the first ever Pong game for Nolan Bushnell at Atari. Then he went on to create the hardware for the first Atari VCS.  That we have the video game industry in its present form is down to these two people.